Editor's Note:Once again, allegations of doping in the sport are making headlines. The following story about Eddy Hellebuyck is from our December 2010 issue; at the time, Hellebuyck was one of only two American marathoners to have been caught doping, and to date, the only one who has admitted to it. We recently reached out via email to writer John Brant for an update: "There was considerable fallout from this story," writes Brant. "Just after publication, Bruce Raymer, a key informant in the piece, withdrew from the New York City Marathon due to anonymous threats pertaining to the story. In 2012, based on the RW story, USADA invalidated Hellebuyck's competitive records from 2001 to 2004, and used the Hellebuyck confessions and its statutes of limitation issues to build its case against Lance Armstrong. Meanwhile, Leonid Shvetsov, the Russian marathoner and ultra-marathoner who Hellebuyck said supplied him with EPO, has continued to compete without sanction. Shvetsov's course records for the Comrades Marathon in South Africa still stand."

Eddy Hellebuyck looks at home in Tucson. He looks at home under the vaulting granite peaks of the Catalina Mountains, whose trails he runs with the same light, effortless stride that carried him to more than 100 career marathons. A veteran of scores of hot-weather races around the world, including the 1996 Olympic Marathon in Atlanta, Hellebuyck looks at home under Arizona's desert sun. He even looks at home in an Italian restaurant in the Tucson suburb of Oro Valley, scarfing Chicago-style pizza and weighing in on Tiger Woods, who on this February day held his first news conference since his sex scandal had broken the previous November.

"I find it interesting that some celebrities are big heroes because of their love life," he says, watching a TV replay of Woods apologizing. A native of Belgium who became a U.S. citizen in 1999, Hellebuyck speaks English with a charming accent and an awkward yet apposite syntax. "But other big stars," he continues in a wondering tone, "they get crucified."

Hellebuyck leans back in the booth. His blue eyes are clear, his face is handsomely seamed and tanned, and at age 49 his 5-foot-4-inch frame remains as lithe as a teenager's. No man could seem more at ease. And yet, despite all appearances, Eddy Hellebuyck is living in exile.

In 2004, when he was 43 and his 25-year running career was enjoying a sudden, blazing renaissance, Hellebuyck failed an out-of-competition drug test administered by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). He vehemently contested the results, which showed that he had used the banned substance erythropoietin (EPO), which enhances endurance, while preparing for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. Hellebuyck fought the case all the way to an arbitration court in Switzerland, but there the results were upheld. In December 2004 he was issued a two-year suspension retroactive to January 31, the date when he was given the test. To this day Eddy Hellebuyck is the only Olympic-caliber American marathoner to have been found guilty of a major doping violation.

Although he continued to claim his innocence after his suspension ended, Hellebuyck became a pariah within the international running community. In 2005, he and his wife, Shawn, and their young son, Jordan, left their longtime home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to start a new life here in Tucson. That new life has taken deep root. "There are so many good things happening for us now," Hellebuyck tells me over lunch. The cross-country and track teams he helps coach at nearby Ironwood Ridge High School both won state titles in 2009. Steve Magnuson, a senior at the school whom Hellebuyck has been mentoring for the last five years, has developed into one of the top prep runners in the nation, earning a scholarship to the University of North Carolina in the process. Hellebuyck plays golf several times a week, Shawn's insurance business is prospering, and Jordan, who is now 15, is starting a promising running career under his father's guidance.

Midway through our meal, Shawn joins us. A brisk, voluble woman of 46, she was part of her husband's management team during his competitive days and continues to advocate fiercely for his innocence. Hellebuyck explains to her that I am thinking of writing a story about him, a story about what happened to her husband after his suspension. Shawn eyes me, then says, "I'll tell you straight out that I'm against Eddy giving you an interview. Why stir up mud that's taken so long to settle?"

And then Shawn begins chanting the mantra of denial that she and Eddy have maintained for the last six years. "Everyone knows that the drug tests are inaccurate and unfair," she says. "Why would Eddy risk doping at the end of his career when he had no chance of making any big money? Do you know what kind of story I'd love to read? Not some tired old story about what happened 10 years ago, but one about an honest athlete trying to redeem himself after a false doping violation." Then Shawn changes subjects, and starts talking about Jordan. "Who knows, Jordan might be the third generation in his family to make it to the Olympics. Did you know that Eddy's father boxed in the '56 Melbourne Games for Belgium?"

After about a half-hour, Shawn stands to leave. She shoots her husband a glance, and then heads out of the restaurant and back to her insurance office. For a few minutes, Eddy and I work at our pizza. On the TV above the bar, ESPN keeps showing Tiger Woods apologizing. I'm thinking that, given Hellebuyck's continued denial, there is no real story here, and that I'll soon be driving to the airport to catch my flight home. But suddenly the conversation shifts when I finally ask Eddy if, in fact, he doped.

"Do you think I did?" he asks me.

"I don't know," I reply. "I don't know you. All I know is what I've read and heard."

Hellebuyck hesitates. He no longer looks like a man at home in the world.

"Yeah," he says, "I did it."

FOR THE NEXT 25 MINUTES, Eddy Hellebuyck continues to confess. On that bright winter afternoon, out of the blue of the desert sky, he singlehandedly begins to break the code of silence shrouding the use of performance-enhancing drugs in distance running. Over the ensuing weeks and months, in a series of interviews conducted over the phone, at his home, and during breaks while training his high school athletes, Hellebuyck would lay out his story in detail. During our initial interviews, Shawn knew that Eddy was talking to me, he says, but she assumed that it was business as usual with a journalist: Eddy persisting with his story of denial. It wouldn't be until early April, six weeks after our surprising lunch, that he would tell his wife the extent of our conversations. From that point forward, Eddy would no longer meet with me one-on-one, and almost five months would pass before the couple granted me another in-person interview. Eddy, clearly, was willing to risk a great deal, including straining his marriage, in order to assuage his guilt. "Shawn doesn't know how I lie awake at night, worrying about what people think of me," Eddy would tell me at one point. Chief among his worries was his son's opinion; as Jordan progresses in his running career, Eddy assumed he would eventually hear the troubling stories about his father. "Jordan deserves the truth," Hellebuyck would say, "and he needs to hear it from me. But how can I tell Jordan the truth while I keep up the denial in public? What am I teaching my son then?"

So many denials: For six years they blanketed his family; now, for Eddy Hellebuyck, they form a bed of nails.

ONE MORNING LAST MARCH, a few weeks after our first conversation, Hellebuyck and I meet at his home in Oro Valley. Jordan is at school and Shawn is at her office. He explains that his decision to start using a performance-enhancing drug began after a series of conversations he had with his wife in the summer of 2001 at their home in a quiet upper-middle-class neighborhood of Albuquerque. With its singular blend of sunny weather, 5,300-foot elevation, and accessible network of mountain trails and other training venues, Albuquerque had drawn visiting runners since the 1960s, when the University of New Mexico started recruiting foreign athletes. Since 1994, when they began renting out rooms to runners from around the world, Shawn and Eddy had helped boost the city's reputation as a center of the sport. Shawn would find races for the athletes and arrange their travel, while Eddy would train and often race with them.

Hellebuyck and his wife, Shawn, in 2003. She helped manage his running career. PhotoRun

The enterprise prospered due to Shawn's business acumen and Eddy's extensive contacts in the sport. During the 1980s and 1990s, he was among the most prolific and consistent professional road racers in the world. He completed most of his marathons in under 2:30, logging more than 20 victories and a 2:11:50 PR. "Eddy was an extremely tenacious competitor," says Mark Plaatjes, the 1993 marathon world champion, who often competed against Hellebuyck. "He did well in races that were a grind, and no one could run quality races more frequently. He had an incredible ability to recover."

In 1996, Hellebuyck realized a lifelong dream, running the Olympic Marathon for his native Belgium. He prepared for the race in Albuquerque, training in a group that included Peter Whitehead from Great Britain, Gert Thys and Josiah Thugwane from South Africa, Khalid Skah from Morocco, and Leonid Shvetsov from Russia. The group would hammer tempo runs in the foothills of 11,000-foot Sandia Crest and log speedwork on the track of a nearby prep school. After workouts the men would relax at the Hellebuycks' spacious stucco house on Seligman Avenue. One evening they were sitting around the kitchen table—Thys, Thugwane, Skah, Shvetsov, Hellebuyck—and decided that the Olympic Marathon champion was sitting among them. "We took a vote, and nobody was allowed to vote for themselves," Hellebuyck says. "I came in second." At the Games, however, Hellebuyck faded after a promising start. "I finished 67th," he says wistfully. "Thugwane, of course, won the gold."

Hellebuyck later ran the marathon for the United States at the 1999 World Track and Field Championships (placing 26th, in 2:20:18), but in 2000, at his first U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, he finished fifth, failing to make the team. His Olympic-level career seemed all but over, or so he indicated to Shawn when they talked one summer night in 2001. "My motivation was gone," Hellebuyck remembers telling her. "I was 40 years old and had been running since I was 14."

Eddy Hellebuyck was born and raised in Deinze, Belgium, a town in the Flanders region. His father, Danny Hellebuyck, was a bantamweight boxer. In 1956, as a member of the Belgian Olympic team, Danny had been eliminated from medal competition in the preliminary rounds in Melbourne. Back in Belgium he turned pro, but an eye injury ended his career. He opened a tavern that became one of the most popular in Flanders. A physically precocious child who began walking at nine months, Eddy entertained patrons by toddling around on top of the bar. "I think in the United States you could never grow up this way," he says. Such an upbringing also proved untenable in Belgium. His mother, Helena, later told Eddy that Danny cheated on her. By the time her son was one, his parents had divorced.

Eddy and his mother went to live with her father, and the Dickensian saga intensified. "My grandfather was terrible to me," Hellebuyck says. "I remember climbing up on the dinner table like I used to climb on my dad's bar. My grandfather hit me so hard I fell off the table and nearly got a concussion. Another time, I did something he didn't like and my grandfather grabbed me and went outside with me and held me by both ankles over the top of a well. 'If you do that one more time, I will drop you in,' he said."

Eddy's turbulent childhood continued when he started school. He tried playing soccer, but due to his diminutive size, he'd be fouled frequently and the refs grew tired of blowing their whistles. The other kids, meanwhile, bullied Eddy mercilessly. "They put me in a trash can and evil stuff like that," he says. "But luckily I could run fast and escape." As a freshman in high school, Hellebuyck joined a club cross-country team, and his quickness and size began to work to his advantage. "I didn't have to worry about refs blowing their whistles or teammates refusing to pass me the ball," he says. "With running, if I train really hard and do my best and live right, I could be somebody."

By his senior year, Hellebuyck had developed into a nationally ranked junior cross-country runner and had resolved to build a career in the sport. In the early 1980s, aspiring Belgian runners often joined the army, which provided training opportunities in exchange for top finishes in the military cross-country meets. The minimum weight for recruits, however, was 100 pounds; when he graduated from high school Hellebuyck weighed just 89 pounds. He received a special exception and was assigned to the tank corps, serving on the NATO front line on the border with East Germany. He squeezed in workouts between drills and maneuvers. "I would run around and around the parade grounds, 50 or 60 laps," he says. "Guys would come out from the enlisted-men's club with their beers and laugh at me."

Hellebuyck persevered, becoming one of the top runners in the Belgian army. In 1982, when he was 21 and married to his first wife, Nicole, Hellebuyck entered his first marathon to prove to various family members that he was a distance runner. (He divorced Nicole, with whom he had two children, in 1992.) Hellebuyck ran a 2:17 that day on scant training. The distance came naturally to the light-boned runner. By 1984, he'd whittled his PR to 2:13 and nearly earned a berth in the Los Angeles Olympic Games. Meanwhile, he happily continued his military career. "I was working hard as a sports instructor," he says. "And I was in the best shape of my life."

At the 1986 New York City Marathon (bib number 59). PhotoRun

Barracks life also taught Hellebuyck how to walk on the wild side. In 1986, he was offered a trip to a marathon in the Philippines. He won the race in 2:19, he recalls, and got drunk at the after-party. "I go home with a Filipino girl, and the next morning I don't know where I am," Hellebuyck says. "I have to sneak out of her house to get back to my hotel. The race organizers give me the prize money in cash, $10,000. But you can't take that much through customs in Europe. So I make a plan with a Philippines Airlines flight attendant, who I'd been dating during my stay there. I get off the plane and go through customs and there is the flight attendant waiting for me in the terminal with the cash."

Hellebuyck would race almost every weekend. African athletes were not yet dominating the marathon, cities around the world were establishing races, and organizers liberally offered airline tickets, hotel rooms, and prize money to elite European and American runners. Hellebuyck found a niche in hot-weather races in exotic locales—Hawaii, Egypt, Nigeria—and in second-tier races in American cities. As was the case in the Philippines, Hellebuyck made a point of enjoying the local color as much as the competition. A few nights before the 1989 Cleveland Marathon, Hellebuyck says, he got so drunk at a bar that he was nearly hospitalized with alcohol poisoning. He was still feeling the effects at the start of the marathon, but to his own amazement, he eventually won the race.

EDDY HELLEBUYCK LOVED THE MONEY, travel, and partying that came with racing, but he also wanted to be taken seriously as a world-class athlete. He dreamed of following in his father's footsteps and representing Belgium in the Olympics. After failing to earn a spot in the marathon at the 1992 Games at age 31, however, it seemed that his fate as a journeyman road racer was sealed. In the fall of '92, he accepted an offer to rabbit the Chicago Marathon. Still feeling strong at the 14-mile mark, he ran the entire distance, finishing third, one of his five top-10 finishes at Chicago. At the postrace party Hellebuyck began dancing with Shawn Kavanaugh, a tall, blond 10-K and 5-K road runner who'd graduated from DePaul University and was now starting out as an athlete's agent. "Right away there is energy between us," Hellebuyck remembers. Between dances, he told Shawn his troubles.

"This is at the height of my rambling days," he says. "I have four girls in love with me in different parts of the world. Four women I am stringing along. I am hurting these girls and know it's wrong. I want to get out, I want to lift above my past life and start over in America. I have been running okay, but I have hit a ceiling. My agent is having trouble getting me good races."

Soon thereafter, and once she had her management business in place, Shawn said to Eddy, "You should come run for me." Hellebuyck jumped at the offer. Within a few months, he resigned from the Belgian army and started the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. Shawn and Eddy, who would marry in January 1995, soon began their life together in Albuquerque, the Shangri-La of distance running. Eddy loved the city because he could hammer the trails with his pals and then go out for cheap margaritas and Mexican food. Shawn, by contrast, recognized Albuquerque as a business opportunity. By the mid-'90s, they had bought several properties and were renting rooms to visiting runners. The rate was a bargain: $10 a day. Eddy knew everybody on the circuit and word got around quickly.

"Teams from A to Z came to train. Angolans to Zambians and everything in between," Shawn wrote in an e-mail she sent in May after learning that Eddy had decided to tell the full story of his involvement with performance-enhancing drugs. "You name it, they trained here. Seventeen Olympians from seven nations trained together in Albuquerque for the 1996 Olympics. Boy, did we learn. We saw athletes drink liver-and-beet milkshakes and Eastern European females do hill repeats pushing a car."

Andrew Letherby, a former elite distance runner for his native Australia, lived with the couple on and off for two years during the late '90s and had Shawn serve as his agent. "My experience with Shawn and Eddy was quite positive," he says. "As an agent, Shawn was great for me. She got me into good races and started me on the path to being a professional runner. And training on a daily basis with world-class athletes was inspiring."

Others in the running community, however, took a dimmer view of the Hellebuyck enterprise. John DeHart, a coach in the Albuquerque area who worked with three-time Boston Marathon champion Cosmas Ndeti and other Kenyan runners, says that Hellebuyck "would crowd six or eight guys into a room that should hold only two or three. I'm a former Marine, and it was worse than I saw in any garrison barracks. The Kenyans tended to be very docile, trusting people. They didn't like it, but they didn't feel like they had the right to complain."

Ryan Board, an American runner who was a tenant of the Hellebuycks intermittently from 1994 to 1996, says that Eddy was known to "nickel and dime you," going so far as to "charge you a dollar for drinking half of a soda" and "renting out my car without asking me." Others sources say Eddy committed more egregious offenses as well, with several saying he would resell running shoes he took from African runners who were his tenants.

Eddy and Shawn deny all of these charges. In reference to Board's car-rental claims, Eddy says, "Maybe we used his car, but we did not rent it out." As for the taking of running shoes, Shawn says, "That is absurd. Eddy always had a shoe sponsorship and didn't need their shoes."

One issue, though, between the Hellebuycks and a tenant actually did lead to a lawsuit. Jose Moreira, a Brazilian distance runner who stayed at the couple's house for two years, sued them in June 1999, charging that they'd withheld payment for his labor. "I cooked for them, I cleaned for them, I took care of their little boy, and they didn't want to give me a penny," Moreira says of the Hellebuycks. "They could get away with this with most of their foreign runners, but not with me. I played dumb, like I didn't understand English, but all the time I kept my eyes and ears open."

While the Hellebuycks claim the suit was unfounded—"I was a stay-at-home mom," says Shawn, "so no one watched our son"—they ended up paying Moreira $11,000, according to Eddy.

Today, Eddy denies that he mistreated Moreira or other tenants. Indeed, from the Hellebuycks' perspective, some of their tenants and other visiting runners started the trouble. "The more prominent the athlete, the more unusual the habit they brought with them," Shawn remembers. "Since it was our town, it was often our problem to resolve. I bailed famous people's spouses out of jail and negotiated for foreign athletes who totaled their car rentals in accidents. We saw a few DUIs and a public urination arrest of a female Kenyan Olympian. I have been asked to accompany mistresses to terminate unwanted pregnancies. I needed to coordinate the housing for a certain athlete's wife and mistress at separate properties. Then there was stuff like malaria and sexually-transmitted-disease relief."

Such was the scene throughout much of Albuquerque's elite running community in the 1990s and early 2000s—a scene that, according to a number of sources, also involved the use of performance-enhancing drugs by many of the visiting runners. "Starting in 1999, we noticed a trend," Shawn says. "Athletes had new sorts of requests. Where to get a syringe, more privacy, leases not in their names. Athletes started traveling with an additional coach who knew nothing about running. A prominent distributor resided in Albuquerque. He was a great athlete who, when drunk, rattled off the list of performance-enhancing users. Most of these athletes were winning major marathons."

The principal substance was EPO. A hormone produced by the kidneys that stimulates the production of oxygen-bearing red blood cells, EPO appears naturally in the body. The pharmaceutical version was developed in the late '80s to boost the red-blood-cell counts of patients suffering from anemia associated with kidney disease. An increased level of EPO in the body can enhance the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood and, hence, a runner's endurance. Its benefits to a distance runner accrue during training; a juiced runner can ring up repeated high-quality workouts, with the payoff coming on race day. Shortly after its introduction, EPO was used illicitly by endurance athletes in Europe, especially cyclists; the drug stood at the center of the scandal that rocked the Tour de France bicycle race in 1998. But in distance-running circles, no prominent American or foreign-born marathoner had been implicated through the first decade of its existence. Still, according to sources, EPO was easy to come by in Albuquerque.

"Several of the French guys would arrive at the airport, and when I helped them with their luggage, I felt the ice packs in their backpacks," Hellebuyck says. "This was their EPO. The stuff had to be refrigerated. When it was time to fly home, the guys would offer their leftover EPO to me, free of charge, but I always say no. In fact, I don't want to even know about it. I'm no prude, far from it, but I never doped [back then], even in the days in Belgium."

Years earlier, before he moved to the United States, Hellebuyck says he attended a training camp in Belgium for athletes from a variety of endurance sports. "One day at the breakfast table, the guys were asking me, because I was the only distance runner there, 'What are you taking?' I'm like, what? This was just normal for the triathletes and cyclists to talk about at breakfast. 'Honestly,' I tell them, 'I'm not taking anything; I'm not doing that.' But they were saying everybody is on something. They tried to convince me that I couldn't do it without it. But it's true. I don't need to dope because I'm a freak of nature in terms of recovery powers. My joints don't take the pounding like bigger runners."

Despite his bitter feelings toward Hellebuyck, Moreira supports his claim of performance-enhancement innocence. "I lived with Eddy and trained with him," Moreira says. "I saw him in all sorts of situations, and I looked into every corner of the house. A lot of other people were doping around town, but Eddy didn't want to have anything to do with it. The whole time I was around him, he was 100 percent clean."

And clean Hellebuyck apparently remained—until, that is, after the last of several conversations he had with Shawn about his career in the summer of 2001. Eddy had concluded that his running had hit a wall-, even though at age 40 and now classified as a masters runner, he was racking up wins and records. Shawn pointed out his recent victories, including American record performances at the Azalea Trail Run 10-K and the Gate River Run 15-K, and assured him that there were more wins to come.

Eddy decided that Shawn was right. He didn't want to give up traveling to races in exotic locations, and he realized that he could win sizable purses in the masters division, especially in the marathon. But he also had determined that his 104-pound body could no longer keep his career going on its own.

It was time to take a new approach to competing.

EDDY HELLEBUYCK SAYS that Leonid Shvetsov, the star Russian marathoner who was part of Hellebuyck's training group for the 1996 Olympics, became his EPO supplier. A medical doctor by training, Shvetsov was a two-time Olympian and the Russian national record holder in the marathon who would go on to win the 56-mile Comrades Marathon in South Africa two times, setting the course record (6:10:11) in 2007. According to multiple sources, Shvetsov was also the "prominent distributor" of EPO in Albuquerque to whom Shawn had referred. Eddy says he had met Shvetsov at the Disney World Marathon in Orlando in 1995. In 1996, Shvetsov began training in Albuquerque, staying for weeks at a time with Eddy and Shawn. Later the Russian bought a house in the same neighborhood as the Hellebuycks.

Hellebuyck and Leonid Shvetsov (left) at the 1995 Disney World Marathon in Orlando, where they met. PhotoRun

Standing 6'1" and weighing 160 pounds, Shvetsov would impress Hellebuyck with his encyclopedic knowledge of the human body and confound him with an ability to run fast marathons. "I had this perfect frame for a distance runner, and here was this huge dude just blowing me away in the long races," Hellebuyck says.

In addition to Hellebuyck, several athletes who trained in Albuquerque at the time say Shvetsov was using and distributing EPO—though none of these runners, except for Hellebuyck, ever claim they saw the Russian inject himself or anyone else with the drug. They also say they never used performance-enhancing drugs. Bruce Raymer, an elite Canadian runner who finished eighth at the 2005 Los Angeles Marathon, says that Shvetsov repeatedly tried to sell him EPO and other drugs in March 2003 when Raymer was living in the same Albuquerque house as Shvetsov and training for the 2003 Boston Marathon.

"Leonid quite openly kept a stockpile of EPO in his refrigerator, behind the milk and orange juice," Raymer says. "He approached me with the offer to sell me some EPO. He told me how easy it was to inject. He quoted me a price for one cycle—$400. I told him no thanks, and he came back to me with an offer of $350. He came back to me several times, reducing the price to $300. It was kind of bizarre. Leonid is a big, menacing guy. I almost wanted to buy some EPO just to get him off my back."

When Raymer continued to decline Shvetsov's sales pitch for EPO, he says, the Russian then offered to sell him the anabolic agent clenbuterol, which is also on the list of banned substances put forth by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Raymer, who last year won Canada's masters cross-country championships, refused this offer as well. "Leonid was pretty brash about drugs," Raymer continues. "His room was like a pharmacy full of banned drugs. Besides the EPO and clenbuterol, I also saw Winstrol [the brand name for the anabolic steroid stanozolol] and Anavar [the brand name for the steroid oxandrolone]."

When Shvetsov was still living in one of the Hellebuyck houses, Jose Moreira says he would come upon him boiling syringes on the stove at one or two in the morning. "Leonid was the rumored supplier of EPO in Albuquerque. He was the master of the whole thing," says Moreira.

"Everybody in the sport knew about Leonid," says Mark Plaatjes. "On the circuit, he always had the reputation as a doper. That's what Leonid did."

"Leonid wasn't clean, and never had been in my book," says Peter Whitehead. "His times in training didn't come close to matching up with his times in races."

"It was common knowledge. If you wanted juice, Leonid was the guy to see," says Ryan Board. "It was a no-brainer."

"Friend of Leonid," in fact, became shorthand around Albuquerque for any runner on the juice.

Two days after his last conversation with Shawn about his career, Hellebuyck and Shvetsov went for a run together. "It's the route we took all the time, leading up from the house and going to the mountains and coming back," Hellebuyck says. "It happened that just the two of us were running that day. I asked Leonid about the stuff. I think he called it a hormone. He said it was undetectable. I said, 'I'm not going to die from cancer? I'm not going to lose my manhood or whatever?' And he is saying, 'No, I've been using it for a long time.'

"He was surprised, I think, that I brought up the subject," Hellebuyck says. "Let me state again that the idea was mine and not his. Leonid didn't try to sell me on it. I don't know what his part of the deal was, why he would be providing. I got a feeling later on, he was thinking that I was like a guinea pig. He got excited about experimenting on a runner with my talent. He wanted to see what he could do with me. I asked him when we could start, and he said tomorrow. My goal was the 2001 New York City Marathon [in three months], and Leonid is saying for the stuff to work you have to get in a six-week cycle before your event."

The next day, Hellebuyck says, Shvetsov came to his house with EPO. (While confirming that Shvetsov gave her husband EPO, Shawn disputes her husband's contention that the drug was ever in the couple's home.) The two men went into a bathroom. "I'm nervous, I'm scared, I'm shaking," Hellebuyck says. "I'm scared to death of needles. Leonid actually put it into my arm the first couple of times. My right arm, underneath the bicep. He said you had to be sure you were giving the right dose at first because you adjust it to your weight. Leonid is a doctor and he knows all this. He puts the needle right here under my arm; there's a lot of skin there. And then, after he was done with me, he did it to himself. Leonid did it in his leg.

"You have to inject just barely under your skin," Hellebuyck continues. "You have to go really, really slow and it makes that bubble, and then slowly that dissolves. It is not in your vein at all. There is no deep penetration. It's really just under your skin. Leonid wanted to give me confidence, I guess. I was so scared—not only the fact that we were going to start cheating, but also the fact that I have to get over my fear of working with the needle. But Leonid said it was totally undetectable, so I went along."

Shvetsov retired from competition in 2009. Contacted at his home in Saratov, Russia, where he now operates a car-service business and coaches Russian distance runners, Shvetsov denies ever taking any performance-enhancing drugs—or providing them to athletes (including Hellebuyck) in Albuquerque. Shvetsov says he occasionally advised Hellebuyck on how to deal with pain issues Hellebuyck was suffering from. "I was buying some supplements and bringing some of them from Russia," Shvetsov says. "I tried to explain to him which [supplement] is for which problem. But Eddy is a somewhat illiterate person...I really don't know why [Hellebuyck would say that I gave him EPO]. Eddy didn't have the best personal relations with me...Eddy is a very greedy person and thinks only about money. Personally, human relationships for him is nothing."

As for the charges made by Raymer and other athletes, Shvetsov said he was surprised that he had such a reputation, and again denied any involvement with performance-enhancing drugs. He attributed the allegations to other athletes' "envy" of his success, general suspicion of Russian athletes, and the fact that he is a medical doctor by training. "It's a Russian thing in the world sport," he said. "Because I have a doctor's education, to many it's a direct confirmation that, 'Oh, he is a source, he is a such and such.' No one caught me on anything." As for the needles Moreira saw boiling on the stove, Shvetsov says, "They were for B12 injections."

EPO's primary benefits are said to accrue during workouts before competition, but for a long time, Hellebuyck says, he didn't feel any effect. Generally, it takes a while for the hematocrit level (the percentage of red blood cells in plasma) to build, and according to Hellebuyck, Shvetsov wanted to make sure that Eddy's level didn't go over 50 percent. You go over that and the authorities flag you, Shvetsov warned him. The Russian provided everything, Hellebuyck says: the drug, needles, and syringes, free of charge (the market rate, according to sources, ranged from $1,000 to $1,500 for one six-week cycle). Hellebuyck says he felt a little guilty; he was his benefactor's guinea pig, and it seemed like the experiment was nothing but a flop. He was showing some improvement in the 5-K and 10-K, but not the marathon, which was Hellebuyck's specialty, and which offered the major financial paydays. "I had a problem in my hip. It started hurting after an hour, and I couldn't run any farther," he says. "I started to feel depressed, like I wasn't getting any benefit from the injections."

The sore hip forced Hellebuyck to drop out of the 2001 New York City Marathon at the 20-mile mark. He went home to Albuquerque, he says, and did not take EPO again until the following March. "It's the same routine: Leonid gives me the stuff and the needles, every three days I inject it up in our bathroom where nobody can see me. I store the stuff in a refrigerator in our bedroom where I keep my private supply of beer." Still, while Hellebuyck turned in quality wins in several shorter distance races in 2002, he continued to have pain in his hip; at June's Kona Marathon in Hawaii, he ran a pedestrian 2:40:18.

Finally, that summer, Hellebuyck visited Plaatjes, who was now a physical therapist practicing in Boulder, Colorado (a native of South Africa, Plaatjes says he has never taken performance-enhancing drugs and did not know at the time that Hellebuyck was using EPO). "Mark gave me this deep-tissue massage that made me cry, that hurt like it must hurt a woman in childbirth. But that broke down the scar tissue, and like a miracle, it cured me in one session. Now I'm able to run pain-free again."

He set his sights on the Twin Cities Marathon that September, when he'd be 41. His goal was to run under 2:20 and notch the A standard for the 2004 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. Hellebuyck ran pain-free throughout the race, but as he approached the final mile, he saw that he still might not meet his goal. The experiment in which he'd invested and risked so much still seemed like a failure. And then, suddenly, he says, all of the years of training and all the injections of EPO kicked in. Hellebuyck felt like he was soaring. "I don't know where it came from. I got that extra boost, and I finished unbelievably fast. How can you possibly kick that fast at the end of a marathon? I say, You know what? That's the first time I was believing in EPO. It was not natural. I mean seriously, the way I kicked down that last 400 yards and ran [to 2:19:59] was just unnatural."

Hellebuyck got his qualifying time, and later the press asked him how he did it. "I told the reporters that I finally figured out how to run a marathon," Hellebuyck says. "I told them that I'd started training with high school runners, doing the strides and drills, becoming a lot quicker. That was somewhat true, but the real reason was I was having extra good blood. So then I was absolutely, totally believing that the EPO really works for me."

He continued his doping routine, and in April 2003, at the Boston Marathon, Hellebuyck finished 10th overall, and first among Americans, in 2:17:18. "All the reporters want to talk to me. I'm now 42 years old, and where are all the other Americans? How did I do it at my age? I tell the reporters that I'm small, I'm efficient, and I'm motivated."

From left: at the 1996 Olympics where he finished 67th; at age 42, Hellebuyck ran 2:17:18 at the 2003 Boston Marathon, finishing 10th; at the 2004 Olympic Trials. The drug test he took just before the Trials proved Hellebuyck was doping and altered the course of his career. PhotoRun

What he didn't tell the media, of course, was that he was juiced. Moreover, he'd passed a number of USADA-administered drug tests. "With my race schedule, I was constantly tested, and I was also tested out of competition many times," Hellebuyck says. "All of these tests were negative, and they came after I was using EPO. You would do a cycle for about six weeks, and you inject every three days, and then it clears your system in 48 hours. So if you have a Sunday race, Thursday morning would be your last injection. Then you travel on Friday and by the time you got to the race and got tested, it's totally out of your system. This plan always worked for me. I was tested at Twin Cities. I was tested in Boston. I was tested pretty much every time I set an American masters record. The Providence 5-K, I was tested there. I'm not sure if I was tested after I won [the masters title] at the Carlsbad 5-K [in 2003], but I'd say that year I was tested a lot."

Winning the masters title at the 2003 Carlsbad 5-K. PhotoRun

TAKING A BREAK during our interview in March, Hellebuyck shows me his trophy wall, which is as heavily decorated as any runner's on earth. The mementos provoke Hellebuyck to repeat his motives for making these confessions: the sleepless nights, the haunted obsessing about his reputation and legacy. "I don't care if it's going to cost me all my money and make me homeless," he says, alluding to the possibility that directors of races where he won prize money while on EPO might now seek recompense. "I want to tell the truth and convince maybe two or three people that 99 percent of the time, I was clean. Then I'll feel okay. Then I'll be able to sleep again."

Later we drive to nearby Ironwood Ridge High School for track practice. A year earlier the school's head coach, Gary Forrest, had given him a new assignment: coaching the hurdlers. Hellebuyck spent much of the previous winter studying the event. At practice this afternoon, he'll be trying out a new drill. "You set the hurdles a notch below race height, but you place them closer together," he says excitedly. "In this way the athlete develops a quick rhythm and proper form."

Dark clouds have gathered over the desert, and a cold rain pelts the track. Hellebuyck had started coaching when he lived in Albuquerque. Now he works for modest pay, and without seeking the limelight. "I love to see the kids develop," he says. "I am able to make running fun for everybody but still demand the best from the ones who have the best to give. This is something I can understand. I think I am a good role model for the kids."

Working with head coach Gary Forrest (in sunglasses), Hellebuyck has helped make Ironwood Ridge one of Arizona's top high school programs. Margot Kelly/Aztrackxc.com

Most of the athletes stay inside the school building to lift weights or run the hallways, but Hellebuyck convinces his hurdlers, a group of eight kids evenly split between girls and boys, to endure the rain in order to perform the drill he'd worked up. Hellebuyck spends a long time setting up the hurdles and adjusting the heights. It seems odd that this former Olympic marathoner isn't working with the distance runners, but Forrest prides himself on coaching distance runners, and Hellebuyck is careful not to impinge on his turf. This even holds true for the training of Steve Magnuson, the team's star, who also braves the rain, trotting warmup laps around the all-weather track.

Hellebuyck had discovered Magnuson four years earlier. Magnuson was talented but unmotivated. He didn't enjoy running and wanted to play soccer instead. Hellebuyck huddled with the boy's father, and they came up with a plan. His father convinced Steve to try running with Hellebuyck for one month, after which he could quit running and play soccer with everyone's blessing. Steve agreed, signing on with Hellebuyck, who infused the boy with the joy of running and racing. Magnuson fell in love with the sport, becoming a state champion in both track and cross-country. The subject of doping, Hellebuyck says, has never come up with the family.

Now the hurdlers splash doggedly through Hellebuyck's drill, knocking over more hurdles than they clear, proceeding on blind faith in their coach that these awkward efforts will somehow bear fruit.

Practice ends, but there are still a few hours before Shawn is due home. Eddy returns to the house, towels off, and sits down at the table with my tape recorder running and continues with his doping narrative.

BY THE END OF 2003, Eddy Hellebuyck's old scruples concerning needles and doping seemed laughable. His introduction to EPO had now proved a roaring success, and everything Leonid Shvetsov had promised turned out to be true. EPO appeared to be undetectable and seemed to have no side effects. Injecting the stuff no longer seemed an ordeal. Hellebuyck was convinced that doping was the rule among elite distance runners. Besides Shvetsov, Hellebuyck accepted the open invitation from French runners to sample their EPO. Gradually, he says, "I came to the conclusion that if I had used EPO in my prime, I could have run low 27 for the 10-K and 2:06 for the marathon. Because I've got the leg speed and everything else. I just didn't have the endurance. That's what EPO gives you, endurance."

Meanwhile, if the sport's establishment was suspicious about Hellebuyck's spectacular late-career bloom, they weren't showing it. "The races really wanted me," Hellebuyck says. "I was making some decent money [his 2003 prize winnings totaled $55,300, making him the year's top-earning male American road runner of any age], and it was fun to win. It was a hard thing for me to say no, because race directors were calling me. 'Hey, if you want to come to our race, I'll pay your airfare. I'll get you a room. I'll take you out to a nice dinner.'"

Hellebuyck also benefited from a lack of high-quality competition; American elite distance running was just starting to emerge from its '90s-era doldrums. "Even at my age, I could compete with the best Americans," he says. "I would be the first non-African finisher, the first American, in all these huge road races. I was the man. I just couldn't say no to these people. I was in an airplane all the time, and it was a lot of fun. I didn't really think about EPO too much. It had become a part of my life. I started to think, You know what, I probably can get this all the way to the Olympic Trials in early '04. I bet I can make the U.S. Olympic team."

His confidence got another huge boost in October 2003 at the Twin Cities Marathon, where he won not only the masters championship but also won the overall title. "I ran 2:12:47 on that course, at age 42, and I totally destroyed the field. I took the lead at the 23-mile mark, and I won by a minute and a half. There were six Africans with me, it was an uphill course at that point, there were three miles to go, and I just powered away from them. I felt like anything was possible with EPO. I felt like Superman."

That win delivered Hellebuyck a payday of $30,500: $20,000 for winning overall; $4,000 for winning the masters division; $3,000 for winning the U.S. masters championship; $2,500 for being the first American finisher; and $1,000 for winning his age group. Hellebuyck received an invitation to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California, and by the start of 2004, he was at the center preparing for the Marathon Trials scheduled for early February in Birmingham, Alabama. And feeling invincible.

"I thought I'd never get caught, that EPO was undetectable, that nobody would ever know my secret," he says. "So I kept popping EPO even at the Olympic Training Center. I thought it was the perfect place to get away with it; nobody would ever expect someone would be crazy enough to do it there. Like I say, it was just part of my life, and at the same time I thought I was Superman.

"I got this big plastic jug of Folgers coffee. I take the packets of EPO, syringes and all, and I bury them deep in the coffee crystals. Then I put the whole thing in the refrigerator in the lunch room, and nobody thinks about it because coffee keeps better that way. My roommate goes to work out, and I go get the coffee jug out of the refrigerator and take it into the bathroom and do my business. I just did my normal thing, like every three days.

"Then one morning, all of a sudden, just before breakfast, the guy from USADA was knocking on the door. He said he had missed me when he came by the week before. I had been away from the center working out at Balboa Park, and he wanted to test me now. He had his credentials and everything. He was from the UCLA lab, I think. He took my urine sample. I think I had put down a unit of EPO two days before. I was probably just inside the 48 hours. I didn't really think about it. Probably since 2001 when I started EPO, I must have passed 10 or more tests. I wasn't too worried. I was just focused on my workout that day."

Hellebuyck shakes his head. "When you're on the juice," he says, "you feel like everything is going your way."

AFTER OUR MARCH INTERVIEW, I didn't see Hellebuyck again until August. During that time, he and Shawn tried to adjust to moving out from underneath their six-year blanket of denials, and it wasn't a smooth passage. Shawn's worries over possible fall-out from Eddy's confessions ranged from a renewed investigation by USADA to angry reactions from old running friends who still abide by the doping code of silence. Shawn's anxiety eventually spread to Eddy, and for weeks-long stretches, he failed to respond to my numerous phone calls and e-mails. Finally, Shawn and Eddy agreed to meet with me in Oro Valley at the start of high-school cross-country season.

On the afternoon we meet, the defending 5-A-II state-champion cross-country team of Ironwood Ridge gathers for an early-season workout. The runners have just logged their first day of school and are buzzing about teachers and room assignments. They meet at Canada Del Oro Riverfront Park for a tough run near the Santa Catalina Mountains. A few drops of rain had fallen earlier, but the usual late-summer monsoon failed to materialize, so the 105-degree heat is juiced by a stifling streak of humidity. Mosquitoes attack savagely. Parents driving late-model SUVs deliver their children to practice and to Coach Forrest and Coach Eddy, who has come to be seen as a role model for the kids. Last May, Hellebuyck delivered three Ironwood hurdlers to the state championship meet, a first for the school. During the summer, he has been supervising the summer training program in preparation for the cross-country season, his fourth with the school. It just so happens that Coach Eddy is also a liar and drug cheat. The man's contradictions abound.

"After all the bad blood between him and me, I still like Eddy," Ryan Board acknowledges. "If I ran into him today, I would offer to buy him a beer."

"I wouldn't trust that guy any farther than I could throw him," says John DeHart. "What he did, cheating honest runners out of the prize money that was rightfully theirs, is no different than breaking into their houses and stealing their property. He has no business being around high school kids."

"The man is diabolical," says Jose Moreira. "Eddy draws you in with his charm, and then he screws you."

Today, Hellebuyck is delivering his own child to practice; Jordan, a freshman at Ironwood Ridge, has already earned a slot in the varsity lineup. They arrive in Eddy's red Hummer. Eddy has come to run, wearing a black T-shirt and shorts, and a white University of Arizona cap turned backward. He makes a quiet entrance to the practice, and the kids and parents brighten when they see him.

After some announcements from Forrest, the girls take off on a separate workout with their coach. Then the boys go, Hellebuyck running with them, moving with that beautiful, light stride that took him through so many marathons, and absorbing a fraction of the pounding attendant to even the great African runners. "In his prime, Eddy's efficient stride and competitive drive gave him all the edge he needed," says Mark Plaatjes. "There was no reason for him to dope."

Running easily, Hellebuyck leads the boys over a soccer field toward a ravine and through a dry-wash river plain. They run over the wash to the sere, steep hills beyond.

Once they are out of sight, Forrest jumps in his car and drives down Lambert Lane to meet his team. "The days of my running with these kids are long over," he says. Forrest is a genial, white-haired man of 68 who turned to coaching a decade ago upon retiring to Arizona after a 33-year career with Dow Chemical. "I leave that to Eddy, who is so good at it, and not because he's a former Olympian. He's good at it because he communicates joy and fun to the kids. Eddy has been 100 percent supportive of what we do here. He helps with the summer training that is the key to our success. I'm pretty skeptical about people and think I have a good sense of them. I've looked hard for any hidden agenda with Eddy, and I've never found a trace of one."

Forrest pulls onto a dirt road at the base of a steep half-mile-long hill. The afternoon heat seems more intense, and quail flit across the landscape. All of Tucson is visible in the valley below, and the Santa Catalina mountains rise craggy and massive in the foreground. It is classic country for new beginnings, and you can see how a man such as Hellebuyck would land here in search of anonymity and healing.

Hellebuyck received notice of his positive drug test in late March of 2004, a few weeks after his eighth-place finish at the Marathon Trials in Birmingham. Despite his long-term cheating, he claims he was shocked when the letter arrived in the mail at his Albuquerque home informing him of the results, and he and Shawn immediately contested the testing process and appealed the findings. They hired Howard Jacobs, the prominent attorney specializing in doping cases, who has represented Marion Jones, Floyd Landis, and other athletes. They contested the case all the way to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland, but the original results were upheld, and Hellebuyck was penalized with a suspension from competition. His performance at the Trials was also stricken from the books. (In a separate case, another American marathoner, Deeja Youngquist, failed a drug test for EPO less than two months after Hellebuyck failed his. Like Hellebuyck, Youngquist trained in Albuquerque, had previously been represented by Shawn Hellebuyck, and also contested the test findings. She was given a two-year suspension. Youngquist declined to comment for this story.)

While the failed drug test and suspension drove Hellebuyck from professional running circles, many people in Albuquerque stuck with him, most notably the kids he had been coaching at La Cueva High School, where he had worked for several years. But over time his support eroded, and Hellebuyck was fired from his coaching job. He left Albuquerque, spending several weeks in Kenya living in training camps in the Rift Valley. Upon his return to the States, he and Shawn made their move to Tucson, where he soon began coaching the kids at Ironwood Ridge.

After a few minutes, the varsity runners come over the hill and pound down to where Forrest waits with a rack of sports-drink bottles. The varsity boys drink and crouch and exhale, and then set out on the first of five half-mile repeats. A few minutes later, Coach Eddy comes over the hill towing a flock of the freshmen, the former Olympic marathoner and pariah of the sport coming on as kind as a grandfather. The rookies crash down the hill and collapse, sucking greedily at the bottles. Hellebuyck gives them a reassuring smile and waits patiently for the flight of varsity boys to return from their repeat. When they appear and start running down the hill, hurting and hot themselves now, Eddy turns a discerning eye on Jordan, who is nursing a sore knee.

Hellebuyck shifts his focus to the upperclassmen. He clocks their 60-second rest and then gathers them for the next repeat. "Let's do this," he says in a quiet voice, and then charges up the hill, providing the boys an expertly measured shot of leadership. The moment forms a small but telling piece of good running and coaching.

Forrest watches them go. "Eddy and I never had a long detailed discussion about what he did, and I don't see the need," he says. "As far as I'm concerned, he served his suspension. He's contrite about his violation and has tried to move on. We vetted him before offering this job, and he passed his background checks. Our athletic director received four or five anonymous letters warning us about him, blasting us for hiring him, but because the letters weren't signed, I paid them no mind. The parents haven't made Eddy's past an issue. I'm not sure they even know about it, and I wouldn't tell them anything unless they asked."

He looks at me and then at my notebook. "But I guess that's going to change pretty soon. I guess everybody in the country is going to learn all about Eddy's past." Forrest pauses for a moment. "If you write a story showing a man trying to come to terms with his mistakes, I think you'll have written a good and valuable story that I'll be proud to be part of. But if you write a story questioning the fact that we gave Eddy Hellebuyck a chance to coach, then I'll be sorry I ever talked to you."

BACK AT THE HOUSE after dinner, Eddy and Shawn sit at the dining-room table with the tape recorder on one more time. Shawn is still unhappy about Eddy's decision to talk to me. "I don't see what good could come out of this story," she says. "It's fine that Eddy feels like he needs to unburden his conscience, but it shouldn't be at our expense. We have talked to Jordan about it now, and I think he understands." She gives a tight smile before continuing. "Thinking through the consequences has never been the strongest part of Eddy's game." She regards her husband with a weary expression; she's upset that Eddy has identified Shvetsov as his initial supplier of EPO. "I didn't think it was nice of Eddy to do. I always considered Leonid as a friend."

Eddy doesn't argue the point. "I'm not saying that Eddy didn't make a stupid, terrible mistake," Shawn continues. "But I think it's important to point out that he is hardly the only American runner of his caliber to use drugs. [Eddy] got caught because he wasn't part of a well-organized, well-financed, medically supervised system. He was just an individual athlete who decided to dabble and paid the price. The fact is, EPO really works when it's used in combination with HGH [human growth hormone] and other drugs over a closely monitored three-month training cycle, and that takes money. The athletes who have the money and power are the ones who are getting away with murder on this stuff. That's who you should be writing a story about."

Shawn may be right. But until at least one other distance runner steps forward to break the code of silence, we can never know for sure. As it stands, Eddy Hellebuyck—who failed his drug test nearly seven years ago—is the only high-profile American distance runner proven to have damaged the credibility of his sport, and own up to it. His name accompanies the doubts that arise in fans' minds whenever a distance runner of any nation smashes a record or achieves a great performance. They all run in the shadow of Eddy Hellebuyck.

Moreover, despite Hellebuyck's eleventh-hour drive for expiation, that shadow continues to define his character. While he claims to be selflessly risking his well-being for the sake of the truth, for instance, his remorse comes exclusively on his own behalf. He worries that racing officials will come back and investigate him. He also worries that he could suffer financially. And then there's the toll it has taken on his friends and family. "After we talked the first time at the restaurant, I felt really good about it," Hellebuyck had told me. "I kept getting really emotional [about confessing]. It is very important to me. I just cannot die thinking that my whole life I was a cheater. I was not. I didn't get any medals or anything, but I did some really great things—I ran a lot of great races, I managed, I coached."

Not once in our conversations has Hellebuyck ever voiced concern for the runners who finished behind him in the races that he ran juiced; the honest athletes who, as DeHart points out, Hellebuyck cheated out of recognition and potential prize money. Indeed, several people I've spoken with speculate that Hellebuyck has stepped forward out of purely self-serving desires to restore his reputation and reclaim the limelight; others scoff at his claim that he was clean prior to 2001. And as Matt Gonzales, an elite American distance runner and University of New Mexico graduate who often trained with Hellebuyck in the early 2000s, told me, "If Eddy really wanted to do the sport a service, he never would've cheated in the first place."

But at the same time, by finally admitting the truth, Eddy also stands alone. However disgraceful his conduct and tangled his motives, he has made a significant contribution by telling his story. Over the course of his confessions, Hellebuyck has exposed a prominent international athlete as a user and provider of performance-enhancing drugs, and has vividly described those drugs' efficacy and appeal. Hellebuyck's narrative suggests that, for all of the moralizing over the subject and all of the international bodies' high-tech testing methods, the single most effective weapon against doping might be the human conscience. Perhaps most important, he may have emboldened other runners to step forward with their stories. If young athletes such as the ones he coaches in Oro Valley are able to compete in an arena even a little less tainted, they will also run in Eddy's shadow.

Hellebuyck draws a little closer to the recorder's mike. "Look," he says, "I made an awful mistake. I was tempted. With EPO it's like you're on the beach and a beautiful girl comes up to you. You start talking to her. You realize if you go home with her, you're going to have one terrific night, but you're going to regret it for the rest of your life."